fiannaFailMan writes: Apple's futuristic new building is neither a new concept nor a progressive innovation. Like the Pentagon and GCHQ, both of which are also owned by secretive organizations, the building is designed to be viewed from the air with no consideration for how it is to be viewed from the street other than hiding it like an embarrassing relative behind a forest of trees, rendering it invisible to all but airline passengers. Its sprawling and insular design philosophy is a last gasp of a dying utopian architectural vision that is thankfully being abandoned as we return to more traditional and sustainable models of urban planning.Link to Original Source

fiannaFailMan writes: Police departments of small American towns and cities have been stocking up on an arsenal that would hold back an alien invasion. Meanwhile, an aerial observation system called Persistence Surveillance Systems that can record the movements of vehicles and pedestrians for later analysis, allowing police to go back to the time and place where a crime was reported and see it taking place, was used in 2012 in one Californian city for two weeks without public knowledge or consultation. Such invasive surveillance combined with excessively militarized policing could undermine support for, and hence the effectiveness of, law enforcement.Link to Original Source

fiannaFailMan writes: Following an investigation by the US Department of Labor, LinkedIn has agreed to pay over $3 million in overtime back wages and $2.5 million in liquidated damages to 359 former and current employees working at company branches in four states. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires companies to have record-keeping systems in place to record overtime hours worked and to ensure that employees are paid for those hours, requirements that the company was not meeting.Link to Original Source

fiannaFailMan writes: The SS United States is the fastest ocean liner ever built. A far cry from the heyday of these great ships that were made obsolete by jet travel, her gutted hulk has been rusting in Philadelphia since 1996. However, like the majestic Queen Mary that now serves as a floating hotel and museum in Long Beach, there are plans afoot to finally find the "big U" a permanent home in New York as part of a waterfront redevelopment.Link to Original Source

fiannaFailMan writes: Before the current offensive in Gaza erupted, the city of Tel Aviv grabbed headlines and the imagination of futurists everywhere with the announcement that a so-called “hover car” passenger transport system will be implemented by the end of 2016 on a trial basis. The concept of Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) is not new. Various attempts at PRT prototypes have been proposed and built in the past, some resembling small bubble-shaped pods running on a rollercoaster-like rail system. Perhaps the most extensive study was carried out in Hamburg in the 1970s. Cabintaxi was a network of elevated tracks using a clever arrangement that had cube-shaped pods suspended underneath the track going in one direction, and other cube-shaped pods sitting on top of the track going in the other.Link to Original Source

fiannaFailMan writes: Governments sometimes see the value of science in purely economic terms, resulting in short-term thinking about what should be funded. For example, the Irish government has been criticized for focusing to much on scientific research that produces immediately tangible benefits, i.e. jobs, that bolster the image of politicians. "Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, European Research Council president, recently reiterated a criticism made two years ago that Ireland is too focussed on research aimed at immediate job creation and as a result is missing out on potential funding. He is also quoted as saying that basic science must be left to flourish before people move to exploit it to create jobs."Link to Original Source

We've had only a few major redesigns since 1997; we think it's time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look. So let's all slow down. Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to the beta; it's a significant number, but it's the best way for us to test drive this new design, to have you show us what pieces need to be fixed, and how. If you want to move back to Classic Slashdot, that path is available: from the Slashdot Beta page, you just need to select the "Slashdot Classic" link from the footer (or this link). We're committed to keep you informed of the plans as changes are implemented; we can't promise that every user will like every change, but we don't want anything to come as a surprise. Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready. We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process. Some of you have suggested we're not listening; on the contrary, some of us are 'listening' pretty much full-time. We're keeping you informed of this process, because we're a community and we want to take everyone with us. But, yes, we're trying something new. Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories. It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that. And in the meantime, we're not sorry to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive. Please keep it coming. We will be adding more specific info here in the days to come.

Hear hear. I've gone back to Classic and I'm afraid to look at Beta in case I can't return. I like being able to see at a glance if anyone has replied to my comments and what score I got for them. Couldn't do that in Beta last time I looked. In fact I found it almost impossible to find my comments, it's as if my comments were lost.

Many people like Car Talk, about 1.4% of the US listen to them.Would it kill you not to be an ass? I mean, it's fine you don't like them, but man you sound like an asshole. Frankly, the Internet has enough of those already.

Thank you for that little pearl of wisdom. Nothing like a bit of blatant ad hominem, with no attempt whatsoever to deal with the point, to break up the day.

Anything else you'd like to say about the completely irrelevant topic of your perception of my personality, you amusingly stupid mucksavage?

Car Talk? Are you f***ing kidding me?! Two assholes with abrasive Boston accents sit there laughing like hyenas at everything the other one says? How anyone listens to that garbage I do not know. Every time it's about to come on I have to dive for the radio and switch it off because I can't even stand the sound of "Suppoht foh cah tawk..." intro, to say nothing of the fingernails-on-a-blackboard country music that follows.

Click: "You know what?"

Clack: "What?"

Click: "I got up early this mohning! Hwahwahwaaaa!"

Clack: "Hwahwahwa! Really?!"

Click: "Yeah! Hwa hwa hwa!!!"

Click and Clack in unison: "Hwa hwa hwa!"

Makes me want to punt the radio into next week.

RadioLab's okay, but the annoying editing is just...uh oh, here it comes... annoying, like when you're tuning into what someone's saying and his voice starts fading out yadda yadda yadda... narrator cuts in across the front of him to comment on who he is or what he's talking about. It'd be much easier to listen to without the gimmicky editing.

This American Life is okay, but I find Ira Glass' creaky voice a little hard to listen to sometimes. Sounds like he's constantly nervous.

As for the local announcers here on KQED, some are better than others. There's one guy who shall remain nameless who I have yet to hear complete a sentence without stumbling over himself, and there's a female announcer who's not much better. People like that wouldn't last long on the BBC. Maybe they're dyslexic or something and have a hard time reading what's in front of them, and I have nothing but sympathy, but they shouldn't be on the air.

But in general I find the quality of NPR's production values a lot higher than PBS. I guess it's a lot easier to do a good job on radio than on TV, so you don't need the BBC's massive budget to nail it.